Like many of us, I grew up hearing fears that workers would be replaced by robots, but that all seemed far away, and the scenario played out differently. Instead, American manufacturing moved to China, where low-wage workers work long hours to make our clothes and mobile phones.
As factory jobs declined, the service sector boomed, with a corresponding increase in warehouse, delivery and food preparation work. That sector is now changing too, and it looks like the robot future is making inroads.
In Cupertino, Kura Sushi sends dishes and beverages to tables on a robot. Roger Bar & Restaurant in Mountain View returns dirty plates to the kitchen with a similar system. I have run into security robots at the Westfield Valley Fair shopping center.
In San Francisco’s financial district last week, I spotted a Waymo vehicle waiting at the intersection, conspicuous by its spinning LiDAR dome and bug-eyed sensors. Since I’m from the provinces and curious, I leaned forward to see if there is a driver, or a passenger-side one that can take over in a pinch. Both front seats are empty. A door opens. A passenger jumps in. The Waymo takes a left.
The rolling robots and industrial-looking autonomous Jaguars will one day be primitive reminders of transitional technology, like a 24-pound Osborne portable computer in the early 1980s, an evolutionary link to today’s smartwatches.
Robotic arms have welded car body frames since the 1960s. On Tuesday, though, a showstopper came when an autonomous robot called “Blue,” developed by Nvidia and Disney, stepped on stage at the SAP Center—and I mean taking steps with legs that bend at the knee. Blue began interacting with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang as the CEO closed out his two-hour keynote, which packed the hockey arena to the rafters.
“The ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner,” Huang has said, which means that robots will no longer be paying occasional visits to our lives, but will rather become our everyday companions and emotional support bots, folding our clothes, preparing snacks and reading bedtime stories to the kids.
“We’ll have AI agents, which are part of our digital workforce,” Huang said during his San Jose speech. “There’s a billion knowledge workers in the world. They’re probably going to be 10 billion digital workers working with us side by side.”
Worker displacement fears may be mitigated, at least in this area, by the economic benefits that percolate around ground zero of a new technology initiative. In a video posted to Instagram by San Jose Mayor and shameless AI booster Matt Mahan, Nvidia vice president Greg Estes referred to “The Capital of Artificial Intelligence, San Jose, California.”
Jensen also gave the city where he started Nvidia a shoutout, “The only way to hold more people at GTC is we’re gonna have to grow San Jose. And we’re working on it. We got a lot of land to work with. We gotta grow San Jose.”
The statement could refer to Mahan’s hopes to expand the convention center and add hotel rooms in downtown San Jose. Or it could mean that Santa Clara-based Nvidia is looking to expand further in San Jose. In December, Nvidia signed a lease for more than 100,000 square feet in North San Jose, according to published reports.
Downtown San Jose has several large parcels earmarked for office development, and projects such as the Google campus and Jay Paul Company’s huge City View Plaza redevelopment have not moved forward. The hints that the emergent artificial intelligence-robotics nexus are eyeing San Jose could be just what’s needed to reboot downtown.
Facilities at San Jose McEnery Convention Center and SAP Center were filled to capacity this week with an estimated 25,000 visitors, and some attendees were turned away. Restaurants were buzzing and nearby venues were rented out for private events. Nvidia fenced off Plaza de Cesar Chavez, added a stage and filled it with food trucks.
As a municipal economic development strategy, embracing a lead player in an exploding industry of the future makes perfect sense, and San Jose’s mayor, a former technology startup executive, has delivered the hug.
Countervailing forces are at work as well. As Huang honored scientists like the late astronomer Vera Rubin in his SAP Center remarks, an anti-science movement is dismantling climate change initiatives, public health policies and fossil fuel replacement strategies in Washington, D.C.
In Sacramento, Teamsters union leadership has lined up behind California Assembly Bill 33 to require human operators in autonomous vehicles used for deliveries. “The widespread deployment of AV delivery vehicles threatens to displace hundreds of thousands of hardworking Californians who rely on their good-paying jobs in the transportation and delivery sectors to support their families,” a Teamsters statement said.
The capital intensive requirements of investing in massive processing infrastructure will mean that the AI future will be scoped and owned by those with access to the hundreds of billions of dollars that will be spent. Benefits may be generally available but wealth will flow upwards. The computational power needed to create digital twins of virtually everything on earth will dwarf any comparable IT builds of the past, and consume record amounts of electricity, at some environmental cost.
As a society, we will have to navigate the tradeoffs, including the inverse relationship between technology dependence and personal competence. Spell checkers and point of sale systems are reasons why writers can’t spell and cashiers can’t add. Drivers, professional and otherwise, can no longer navigate streets without a GPS.
The same great technology that allows us to do so much can also make us dumber. Artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous vehicles will no doubt allow us to boost productivity and crack new challenges. The juggernaut is here.
After that, who will create the innovations to train the models? Will learning models train themselves and become more ingrown and self referential? Will the turbocharged tools of the future create our next Bowies and Basquiats, the paradigm busters that are the flagships of our humanity?
Jensen Huang’s March 18, 2025, remarks can be viewed at Investing.com and on YouTube.
